Anyway, the study didn’t quite find Neymar to be some kind of brainless soccer zombie, but the results were remarkable nonetheless. Naito and Hirose write:

We scanned Neymar’s brain activity while he rotated his right ankle. We also scanned three other professional footballers, two top swimmers, and one amateur footballer, all of whom performed the identical task.

We found activations in the left foot motor cortex regions during the foot movements in all participants. However, the size and intensity of [foot motor cortical] activity was smaller in the four professional footballers than in the three other participants, and Neymar’s activity was smallest of all.

In other words, while performing a football-related motor task (ankle rotation), the pro footballers showed less neural activity than other athletes. And Neymar, one of the best players in the world, showed the least brain activity.

This study was just about one very simple movement – so the headlines claiming that Neymar uses less brainpower to playfootball were extrapolating wildly. There’s more to soccer than twitching your ankle. Nonetheless, the basic paradox remains – we see less brain activity in people with more expertise.

This is not a new discovery, but Naito and Hirose provide a great illustration of the phenomenon, which one might call the Neymar Effect.

For me, the Neymar Effect is a deeply disturbing one, because it seems to undermine the logic of many fMRI studies. Suppose you scan some patients with a disorder, and some healthy people, performing some task. You find that on average the patients show reduced activity in a certain area, compared to the controls. What does that mean?

The intuitive interpretation is that less activity in a brain region means less engagement of that brain region’s function. So if the region’s function is ‘memory’, say, it would be natural to read reduced activity as less remembering. The results mean that the patients are not remembering as well as the controls are.

In other words, it is natural (and very common) to start from neural activity and draw conclusions about psychological processes. A swathe of the fMRI literature is based on this approach. But the Neymar Problem is that any given dampening (or excess) of activity could just as easily reflect more (less) efficient processing, rather than less (more) processing per se. So the inference from activity to psychology is invalid.

This is a separate issue from the fallacy of reverse inference, which concerns how we ascribe ‘functions’ to brain regions. The Neymar Effect means that even if our assumptions about the localization of function are unerring, we still might go astray when it comes to interpreting quantitative differences in activity.

Hi, I wanted to read the post about deadly lake waters, turning birds into stone.

http://petrossa.me/ petrossa

Exactly what i’ve been shouting in th wind for years now…. With fMRI you cannot know what the results mean, you don’t know what the brainstructure in question causes other areas to (not) do.

RogerSweeny

This makes me think of Kahneman’s system 1 and system 2. When you’re good at something, you don’t have to “think about” it much. Neymar is very good at using his feet. His brain doesn’t have to spend much energy on that; it can instead build models of the field, where people are going, where a pass should be aimed, how fast, etc.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/ Neuroskeptic

Right, that seems very plausible. Although strictly speaking we can’t infer that from the fMRI data.

I think Roger Sweeny is on the right track. Processing of highly automated movements transfers, to a large degree (not completely) from motor cortex to basal ganglia. “Automated movements” are those that are highly trained and over-learned. The neuroscience behind this is largely from Ann Graybiel’s lab. What’s going on when you tie your shoes? When you first learned to tie your shoes? Conscious control is largely serial, one-at-a-time. Automated activities can go on without rigorous conscious supervision, and can go on when conscious focus is elsewhere (think of driving). I find the rough conclusion of the Neymar finding very cool, and predicted from known neuroscience.

But its critical to point out that, if Neymar’s foot control moved, to a large degree, from motor cortex to basal ganglia, it remains within the brain.

Discover Blogs

Neuroskeptic

No brain. No gain.

About Neuroskeptic

Neuroskeptic is a British neuroscientist who takes a skeptical look at his own field, and beyond. His blog offers a look at the latest developments in neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology through a critical lens.